Why Use an Email Marketing Service Provider to Send My Email Newsletter?

Way back when, at the start of my career, I periodically sent out HTML email marketing messages to a big list of my clients and prospects about a service or new opportunity. At the time HTML email marketing was fairly new to the marketing world, and wasn’t yet widely adopted.

I made the mistake, as did many others, of sending these messages right from Outlook like I did with all of my other email messages. Why not, right? Wrong!

In fact, one day some people stopped receiving email from me completely!

I went into panic mode pretty quickly because my whole business used email as its main form of communication, and this was a disaster. I did some research and quickly found out I was flagged as a spammer by one large email company because I was sending several email messages with the same subject line and messages to very large groups of people!

It took a lot of work to get back into that provider’s good graces, including tons of phone calls, emails, applications and even some begging. After that, I made it my mission to learn everything I could about email marketing, HTML email, spam laws, and service providers — one of which became my best new email asset.

To do any type of email marketing, you have to set up an account with an email marketing service provider. These service providers enforce strict email rules, work tirelessly to keep their servers white-listed (liked) by the internet service providers / email providers, provide you the ability to track and measure your email marketing campaign results, and manage your email marketing list subscribes and unsubscribes.

There are a lot of email marketing service providers available and I am often asked, “Which is the right one for my business?”

The key to answer that question is knowing what you intend to do with your list, what size your list is, how often you will be sending emails to your list, and how you plan to use your list. Then you can compare that information with the features of each individual provider. The features vary from provider to provider, but one area where they vary greatly is how the service is paid for.

For example:

• Some service providers charge you an account setup fee and some do not.
• Some service providers charge you a specified fee to send an unlimited number of emails, while others charge only when a message is sent.
• Some service providers determine fees by the size of your list or how often you send email marketing messages to your list.

When evaluating service providers, be sure to look at the features they offer and verify they offer services you want to use or add-on in the future. Find out if they offer only one auto responder message or the capability to send an entire auto responder campaign, if you can have multiple lists with separate opt-ins, and learn how you can customize your email templates and what tracking options are available.

Click here to read my blog post with more information and a list of email marketing service providers.

Click here to learn more about Bourn Creative’s email marketing design and implementation services.